Imagine you’re out in public, just going about your day. Let’s say you’re in the grocery store.
And as you’re pushing your shopping cart down the aisle, you notice a tall man, maybe 10 feet ahead of you, looking at the items on the shelf. And suddenly, that man collapses to the floor.
What would you do?
Most people don’t really know what they would do, until a situation like that actually comes up. Some people just freeze. If it happens in a busy place, some people will just keep walking. There’s this interesting psychological effect called diffusion of responsibility – that just means that everyone who sees something like this happen just assumes someone else will help. But the end result is that no one takes action.
But then there’s another type of reaction. There’s the person who sees an emergency like that, and their first thought is “what can I do to help that person?”.
My guest in this episode is Kevin, and that was his reaction. He was just finishing up a round of golf and was walking back to the clubhouse. And he saw that someone was on the ground.
This is a Flashback episode. Kevin told this story on the podcast 5 years ago. So afterward, you’ll hear what he’s been up to since then.
Full show notes and pictures for this episode are here:
https://WhatWasThatLike.com/209
Graphics for this episode by Bob Bretz. Transcription was done by James Lai.
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Episode transcript (download transcript PDF):
Imagine you’re out in public, just going about your day. Let’s say you’re in the grocery store.
And as you’re pushing your shopping cart down the aisle, you notice a tall man, maybe 10 feet ahead of you, looking at the items on the shelf. And suddenly, that man collapses to the floor.
What would you do?
Most people don’t really know what they would do, until a situation like that actually comes up. Some people just freeze. If it happens in a busy place, some people will just keep walking. There’s this interesting psychological effect called diffusion of responsibility – that just means that everyone who sees something like this happen just assumes someone else will help. But the end result is that no one takes action.
But then there’s another type of reaction. There’s the person who sees an emergency like that, and their first thought is “what can I do to help that person?”.
My guest in this episode is Kevin, and that was his reaction. He was just finishing up a round of golf and was walking back to the clubhouse. And he saw that someone was on the ground.
This is a Flashback episode. Kevin told this story on the podcast 5 years ago. So afterward, you’ll hear what he’s been up to since then.
Scott
On that day – at the golf course – how many other people, do you think, knew CPR?
Kevin
I’ve thought about this, after the fact. There’s a pool at the golf course. There are 3 or 4 lifeguards at the pool – they probably knew CPR. I would imagine that, at any golf course, out of 100 people, there would probably be a handful who’d know CPR. Obviously, there are some doctors who are members of the club, and they, obviously, would have known CPR.
Scott
Yeah, it’s good to have somebody like that around. I was doing a little bit of a background check on this. Before we spoke, I found out some interesting statistics. There are basically 3 things. 1) Over half of Americans say that they know how to perform CPR. 2) Only 1 out of 6 knows that the recommended technique no longer includes breaths – it’s compressions only. 3) Only 1 out of 10 know the actual correct pace for those compressions – which is 100 to 120. How did you happen to know how to do CPR the right way?
Kevin
In my previous job, I was the general manager of a few golf courses for the county of Bergen. We had 5 golf courses and we managed a lot of those golf courses with a lot of part-time staff. Each year, we would have an orientation for those staff members in our headquarters. The orientation would occasionally have CPR training, but not every year. I didn’t do the CPR training every year, but I was around for it. Every year, we did it. I heard it all the time. I heard – when that change came on board – that you no longer had to do the breaths. So, through repetitions of those pieces of training, I remembered enough to muddle my way through when it was an important time to remember.
Scott
That’s good. A lot of it stuck then. Take us through what happened that day. Where were you? Where did this actually happen?
Kevin
So, it actually happened on the first tee of the golf course. I was finishing my round of golf. It was about 11:30 to 12 O’clock. I had just finished the 18th hole and was walking up the hill. There’s a hill behind the 18th hole. Then, there’ll be a little cart path and some steps up to the 12th tee, which is adjacent to the first tee.
Scott
Is this at the course where you normally play?
Kevin
Yeah. This is at the club, Forest Hill Field Club in Bloomfield, New Jersey – that’s where I grew up playing. Since I’ve become the executive director of the State Golf Association, I have gone back there as a member and thoroughly enjoyed being there. So, I walked up the hill to where the cart path is. I happened to look over towards the first tee and saw a friend of mine standing oddly and looking straight down. I had a quick glance but didn’t think much of it. I went back to my scorecard. I was filling out the card with a lackluster round of golf. I didn’t finish particularly well on the 18th hole, so I wasn’t in the best of moods. I walked up the stairs to the same level as the 12th tee and looked over to the first tee. I realized that there was somebody on the ground and my instincts took over. I just ran over there. When I got there, he was laying on the ground. My friend Frank was on base. He was standing over him and trying to talk to him. So, I knelt down and the man was completely unresponsive. I did not know him. I didn’t even know his name. He was lying on his side. His eyes were wide open and he was breathing laboriously. He had fallen in a way that his glasses were mangled around his eyes and cut the bridge of his nose. So, the first thing I did while he was breathing like that was I lifted his head. I wanted to make sure that there wasn’t anything clogging his throat. So, I lifted his head as I got the glasses out of there. He was still breathing at that time, so I thought, “Okay, what do I do now?. My first thought was, “If he’s breathing, the body wants to stay alive. So, let’s let him breathe and see if it can correct itself.” Again, he was not responsive. There was no response at all from him when I waved my hand in front of his eyes and Frank called his name from behind me. So, we were just monitoring him. At that moment, a young lady came and knelt down on the other side of him. She said, “I’m a doctor’s assistant”.She immediately reached for his wrist and said, “I have a pulse”. So, I said to her, “Well, he’s breathing. He has a pulse. Let’s just see what’s going on. Let’s just leave it be for a minute”. Almost instantaneously, she said, “I’m losing the pulse”. Then, he stopped breathing. At that point, she said, “Do you know CPR?”. I said, “Well, we’re gonna find out” – I didn’t say that. I put him on his back. I found his breast breastplate, put one hand over another, and started compressions. So, a year prior to this – at a meeting that we have for all of our golf courses – the member clubs came to a meeting that we had speakers come to. I had the opportunity to speak and introduce some of those speakers. As part of my introduction, I had said that golf courses should really have CPR training – because I remember us doing it at the public golf courses. I had just recently heard on the radio that the rhythm for compressions goes to the song “Stayin Alive”, and that came to me at that moment. So, I started singing it to myself as I was doing the compressions – knowing that I needed to push the blood from the chest cavity all the way to the brain. I realized that I was pushing pretty hard, but I kept doing that – he was a big man. I realized that – not from looking at the length of his body – when I moved his head to get the glasses out, for me, it was a heavy head. I thought, “He’s a big man. I’ve gotta push to make sure that this happens”. It turns out that the gentleman was 6’8”. I was pushing hard, thinking, “I’ve got to move this blood from his chest to his brain”. That continued until there was, kind of, a jerk. He sat up. About a quarter of the way, he took a big breath, went back on his back again, and started breathing laboriously.
Scott
How many other people were around you at this time?
Kevin
It was me and Nicole. I could hear Frank behind me. I didn’t realize, until after the fact, that there were 20 people around us.
Scott
Yeah. Of course. During something like that, you’ll have tunnel vision.
Kevin
Yeah. I couldn’t see anybody other than the young lady next to me – who I didn’t know either. I heard Frank’s voice behind me trying to coax him back. Other than that, I didn’t know if anybody was around because I was really focused on him.
Scott
With a crowd like that, I’m sure somebody had already called 911.
Kevin
Correct. Our golf professional, Jason Fiori, had called 911. So, after he came back the first time, went out again. So, we started compressions and kept that going. It wasn’t until the second time that I could actually hear an ambulance siren coming in the background. Let me tell you… in the heat of the moment, it seemed like it took an hour for it to get there. CPR is actually tiring to perform because you’re using your entire body to generate enough energy to make the compression. So, I could hear the ambulance in the background but didn’t pay much attention to it. I knew that was common and kept the compressions going. Again, there was a jerk from his body. He sat up quickly – only a quarter or so – came off the ground a little bit, and started breathing really hard again. At that time, again I remembered to make sure that there was clear airflow. I wanted to get a look at his mouth to make sure that he didn’t have anything in his mouth, and there wasn’t. It was just this very difficult breathing. It was, like, a bad snore, where somebody falls asleep on a chair in an unnatural position. He’s got that bad snore. So that’s what it was. He was still unresponsive. There was no reaction over his eyes, which were wide open. So, we let them monitor him again. Then, he went out again. So, this happened, in my estimation, 4 or 5 times before the EMTs arrived.
Scott
That part of it just seems so unusual to me because when you see somebody performing CPR in a movie or on TV, they would immediately come back. It’s like, “Oh, he’s back! Thankfully, he’s okay now”. Even on a CPR demo or instruction, you would bring them back. I haven’t heard of them going back in and coming back out of it – back and forth – several times like that.
Kevin
Yeah. As I said, it happened at least 4-5 times before the EMTs came. When the EMTs came, I thought that I could just back off and they would take over, but that wasn’t the case. 1 person came around from the back of his head to put on an airbag. Then, the other person went across from me to replace Nicole and started unraveling the portable defibrillator. They took off the pads, placed the pads, and took the shirt off. They placed the pads in the right spot. During this time, I was still doing the CPR compressions. The EMT who was at the head of the patient said to me, ”I’d like you to do it a little deeper and a little slower”. So, I adjusted. Then, there came a time when the defibrillator was ready and charged. So, these things are amazing pieces of equipment. It’s really set up for a person who knows nothing about them.
Scott
What you’re talking about is called an AED.
Kevin
An AED, yeah. It’s a portable defibrillator. It was going to measure the heart and monitor the heart, once the pads are in place. 1 goes on the chest. There’s a picture on it. 1 goes on the chest, 1 goes on the side of the chest, and it sends a pulse through. So, it measures the electric waves that are in the heart and shocks him to restabilize those waves. It got to the point where it needed to do that. So it went off automatically and said “Charging clear”. That’s when everyone backs away so that they don’t get shocked. His whole body convulsed, jumped off the ground, and went back down. Then, he had another rhythm. He was back again, but not conscious. At that stage, they said, “Okay, let’s pack him up”. So, they kind of moved him around and put him on the gurney. As they were about to move him out, he went out again, so they started CPR while he was on the gurney until they got him to a stable state. Then, they moved through the back of the clubhouse, out towards the parking lot, and took him.
Scott
I read part of what you wrote about earlier. One of the things you said was Nicole calmed you while you were doing the compressions. Can you talk about that? How did she do that?
Kevin
Absolutely. She just said, “What’s your name?”. I said, “Kevin”. She said, “Okay. So, you know how to do CPR. Let’s just take this one step at a time.” Just having somebody’s voice in my ear that wasn’t panicky at that moment was calming for me. She said she was a doctor’s assistant and she knew this stuff. I found out later that she had actually never performed CPR before, but had obviously taken a pulse for every patient that came into the office. So, she was just a steady hand there while things about what I could be doing for the man were racking around in my brain.
Scott
Isn’t it amazing that – in a situation like that – people who don’t even know each other can, all of a sudden, form a team? You all have the same goal.
Kevin
Yeah.
Scott
Everybody just works together.
Kevin
Yeah. Just knowing that there were other people behind me who had already called for an ambulance– if I had come upon this man by myself, I don’t even know if I would have thought of calling an ambulance until 2 or 3 repetitions of this thing. As I said before, I didn’t know who was around me. I knew Nicole was there, but if I was only by myself, I would have been racking my brain, trying to figure out how to help this man – and might not have thought about the ambulance. When you do CPR training, the first thing you should do is to make that call to the ambulance before you start anything else.
Scott
Yeah, or instruct someone else nearby to make the call.
Kevin
Yeah.
Scott
That aside, have you ever seen the episode of The Office about CPR training?
Kevin
I have not.
Scott
Oh, man.
Kevin
After having gone through our own training here in our office, I can imagine that it is a pretty good episode.
Scott
It is pretty good. I’ll link that in the show notes. You’ll get a kick out of that.
Kevin
Great.
Scott
So they loaded him into the ambulance. At that point, he was just off to the hospital. Right?
Kevin
Correct. I was standing on that first tee. When I looked up, for the first time, I could finally focus on something other than him on the gurney. I realized that there were a lot of people standing around – some of them were within an arm’s length, some were 10-20 yards away, and some were all the way on the other side of the 12th tee. There were a lot of people standing there. I thought to myself, “I can’t speak to any of these people right now”. Some of them came toward me saying, “Wow. That was great”. I was like, “Yep. Thank you” and I just moved away to the closest door of the clubhouse and walked into the clubhouse. I remember that it was still early in the morning. I wanted to get to a room where I could just decompress and just take a moment. I thought the shower room would probably be the best because it was still early. Nobody had made their way there yet. So, I went into the shower room. I was alone for a little bit. I thought to myself, “Holy cow. What just happened?” At that time, my brother, Tim, came in – he was on the property. I don’t think we had played together, but we may have played together. Anyway, he came in, put his arm around me, and said, “Wow, that was incredible!” We stood there and cried for a little bit.
(Snuffling)
Sorry.
So, we talked a little bit. We were able to clear the air and just talk through what happened. Eventually, it was time to get on with the day. We were gonna have lunch on the patio. So, I went out to the patio and sat there. Again, everybody was coming up to me, saying that I was incredible and everything. I just had time to relax, take a few breaths, and sit down.
Scott
Yeah. It takes time to process all of it.
Kevin
Yeah.
Scott
As you said, “What just happened?”
Kevin
Yeah.
Scott
Man.
Kevin
To go into something like that– I always wondered if I’d be the kind of guy who would be happy to jump in and do that. I had done CPR training – it had been 6 years since I had done it. You’re not thinking about that as you’re walking toward somebody who’s down on the ground. When I knelt down, I just knelt down out of compassion for the person – I guess, I don’t know – to see if I could do something and it turned out that I could.
Scott
He was very fortunate to have you standing by and noticing something. This man’s name is Carlos Tapia. I was able to contact him and actually got a few comments to get his perspective on what happened that day.
Carlos
Hi, my name is Carlos Tapia. I joined the Forest Hill Golf Club in Bloomfield, New Jersey. I’m 76 years old. By August 27, around next week, it will have been one year since my second chance, thanks to Kevin Purcell. On this same day last year, I was teeing off in the first call and collapsed. I went into cardiac arrest. Kevin was finishing 18 holes and could see something was going on. So, he ran to where I was and started performing CPR for about 10 minutes until the ambulance arrived. I was electrically shocked in the ambulance via the defibrillator. I was able to play within 30 days after 2 weeks of getting a pacemaker. I would say that Kevin is a wonderful person. If it weren’t for him, I don’t think we’d be recording this right now. I will be grateful to him for the rest of my life.
Scott
He’s obviously a grateful guy.
Kevin
It’s pretty cool hearing that.
Scott
What’s amazing is he was playing golf again within a month after that.
Kevin
I saw him at a tournament a month later. I couldn’t believe it. Somebody told me, “I think Carlos is playing in this tournament”. We have a big tournament called the Silver Putter in September. I said, “Get out of here”. Sure enough, I saw him a little later that day. He came over and gave me a big hug. We didn’t know each other. That was the first time we were meeting. We got to talk a little bit. As you can tell, he’s Argentinian and, I said before, he’s 6’ 8” inches tall. He had played for the Argentinian national basketball team. He had joined the club not too long ago, so we haven’t had a chance to cross paths, so it was really cool to meet him that day. It is really amazing.
Scott
Did he recognize you or did you recognize him? Did other people just say, “Hey. You guys need to talk to each other”?
Kevin
I think other people put us together. Yeah. It’s hard to miss him because he’s that big of a man – he’s at 6’ 8”. You don’t have many 6’ 8” people walking around a golf club. So, I saw him when he was coming. We have developed a friendship since and it’s just wonderful.
Scott
That’s cool. Now, you and he were in attendance at an event. Can you tell us about that?
Kevin
Yeah. So, the Metropolitan Golf Writers Association gives out an award each year for somebody who has performed some sort of humanitarian act – saved a life or did something similar. The name of the award is the Mary B Porter award. It’s given at their annual dinner where they also give out 5 or 6 other awards. There’s the Club of the Year and the Gold Tee award, which went to professional golfer, Jim Furyk, that year. It was at the beginning of this past summer. The neat thing was Mary B Porter was there. I was able to sit next to her on that day. We talked about her life-saving act, which happened back in the 80s when she was a player on the LPGA Tour. She had noticed some commotion in a pool adjacent to the fairway that she was on. So, she was close enough to the property line. She went over to the fence while her playing partner played a shot. She realized that there was a kid struggling in the pool, so she worked her way over the fence with the help of her caddy. She got over there. The kid’s father was there but he was so distraught when he grabbed his kid out of the pool – the kid was unresponsive – that he just handed the kid to Mary B. Porter. Mary didn’t know what she was doing – pretty much like me. She turned the kid upside down. She shook him a little bit and got enough water out of him for him to start breathing again. She saved a life. So, that was an award that I was happy to get, but it’s certainly not necessary – I said that in my acceptance speech after I had a couple of minutes to just say ‘Thank you’. I said that this is a really neat award and it’s nice to be recognized, but it really is unnecessary. I said, “The real reason why this is cool is because of the gentleman standing over here”. So, I pointed out into the crowd and Carlos stood up. I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Carlos Tapia” and the crowd stood to their feet. As I said, there were 400 people in the room. It was an incredible night…
Scott
The crowd went wild.
Kevin
The crowd went wild, for sure. Yeah.
Scott
Well, now, you’re on some sort of a crusade to get CPR training and everything on golf courses and clubs. How is that working or what’s your involvement with that?
Kevin
I realized – after getting so many nice notes from friends and strangers – I should try to motivate clubs to have their staff better trained. So, I wrote an article for our magazine. Remember, I’m the executive director at a State Golf Association – we have a magazine. There are about 65,000 members in our association that get the magazine. So, I wrote an article to be published in that magazine. We had made arrangements with the American Red Cross. A young lady came out and sat with us. She told us about how easy it would be to do training for the clubs. So, we arranged a program for them, through our website, to get connected with the American Red Cross, to set up training in their local area for their staff members if they wanted to. Then, we started promoting it at our golf summit. At this year’s golf summit, we had Courtney come out and talk about the program. We’re still in the process of trying to get clubs to engage with this program and get their staff trained.
Scott
It’s obvious that a program like that is, absolutely, going to save lives.
Kevin
Yeah, I agree. In November, I’ll be getting together with the International Association of Golf Administrators – I’m a member – so I’ll also speak about it there. Hopefully, some other associations will also get this program as part of their benefits for clubs.
Scott
Yeah, that’s great. Well, whatever links we can provide to other clubs or golf courses that want to get involved with this – to get the training for their staff – I’ll put those links in the show notes for this episode. So, they can see that there. Great job. It was a bad day of golf for you, but that’s a good way to end it, right?
Kevin
Absolutely. There’s never really a bad day at golf but this one was pretty special. This will be one I’ll remember for the rest of my life, for sure.
Scott
Kevin, welcome back to the show!
Kevin
Thanks, Scott. Pleasure to be here.
Scott
So it’s been five years ago since you were on the podcast, and it was a year before that that you saved Carlos’ life on the golf course. Do you still see him sometimes?
Kevin
I do. Yeah. I’m fortunate enough to see him. He’s actually moved to Florida, so we got a number of miles between us, but he does come back to New Jersey because he’s still got some family up here. In fact, I saw him during the summer months. This past year in July, he came up to visit some family and we had lunch at the club where the incident took place and he was able to see a bunch of other people – and they saw us together, which was kind of a fun thing for everybody to kind of joke with Carlos about and left with Carlos about and just remember,
Scott
Yeah, they hear these stories or this story and, now, here’s the two main characters right there
Kevin
For sure. And when you’re at a club like that, it’s a kind of a tight-knit community and people know each other’s business a little bit. This was always something that people would say to me every once in a while – and they’d say it to Carlos, but then we were sitting there together– everybody in the club was coming up and saying, well, how great it was to see us sitting together.
Scott
Yeah. And for the two of you too just to reconnect.
Kevin
For sure. Carlos is in his 80s. He had been a tremendous athlete in his day. He actually played basketball for the Argentine national team back in his twenties. So, he’s always been an athlete. He took up golf late in his life and he’s just a really nice guy, but he always appreciated the challenge of golf. I kind of took up golf when I was young, so I’m a pretty good player. So it was always just talking about golf and now we’ve got something else to talk about as well – how we shared an incident.
Scott
You guys have a connection, like very few people have. That’s just pretty incredible.
Kevin
I remember the first time I saw him after the incident. It was an awkward meeting because it was at one of the events at the club – it was a number of months afterwards, so he’s completely back to health – but you could tell that I am sure he just wasn’t sure how I’d react and I wasn’t sure really how he’d react. After a little awkwardness for a few moments, we just got back down to just kind of remarkable about what we had been through and just reminiscing about that.
Scott
That’s pretty cool.
Kevin
Yeah.
Scott
I wanted to ask you something. When we spoke and recorded the original podcast interview, you were telling the story. When you got to the part where you had already performed CPR, you were done. Carlos was taken away in the ambulance, I think, and you had a moment to yourself where you talked to your brother. I could tell, when we were speaking then, that was kind of an emotional moment for you, but I never followed up and asked you about that. Can you just talk about what that was?
Kevin
Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s emotional for me now – even the idea of having to go through that. Remember, it just took about a half hour between when I first saw Carlos and when the ambulance arrived and they kind of worked their way through it. I was actively involved there while the ambulance personnel were there. They didn’t want me to stop. They kind of worked around me, and it was kind of an exhausting thing. You’re doing a physical activity for the better part of a half hour and then it was time they wrapped them up, they got them on the stretcher, and off they went, and everything gets kind of quiet, but there’s 30 people around the tee.
I didn’t want to talk to anybody, so I kind of escaped. I went into the middle of the building. I actually went into the men’s shower area because I knew nobody would be in there that time of day, and my brother found me. My brother kind of came out, came around. He heard of what had happened. He wasn’t really on the tee, but he heard afterward and he was looking for me and found me in there, and it was an emotional thing. As I said, I’m feeling it now too because you’re trying to help and, for about 20 minutes there, it didn’t look like I was helping at all. Nothing was really happening. But then, when the DMT people came, they at least got them to a point where they could move them and, still, there was no real sense of whether he would make it or not at that stage. He was still left unconscious. So, yeah, it was definitely an emotional thing and, as I said, I still feel it.
Scott
Well, it’s such a big thing. I mean, you’re just out on a nice day just looking to play golf and, all of a sudden, you’ve got this life-or-death situation put right in front of you.
Kevin
Yeah.
Scott
I mean, that’s an emotional rollercoaster.
Kevin
For sure. Yeah, it was. I remember I was just finishing my round and he was just starting his. I was coming up off the 18th green, walking up the hill when I saw a friend of mine standing over him, looking down and it was just an odd stance. So, when I got to the top of the hill, I looked over, I realized that somebody was on the ground, so I just ran over. I hadn’t done training in a number of years, but it just kind of took over naturally. I just wanted to try, so–
Scott
Instinctively…
Kevin
Yeah.
Scott
One other thing I wanted to ask you about, you had mentioned to me that the New Jersey State Golf Association has now implemented CPR training for their staff. Is that something that you initiated because of this?
Kevin
Yeah, for sure. The way I was trained was at a previous job when we had decided that was a good thing for us to do. And again, it was at a golf course, so we trained the staff at that stage too. So it was a natural thing to do just kind of a reminder to say, “Hey, we should be doing this.” So, we not only did it for the staff of the State Golf Association so that we’d be prepared if something happened at one of our events, but we made an arrangement with the American Red Cross chapter in New Jersey to do trainings at clubs and courses.
I spoke at our golf summit early that next spring and then we launched a program where the clubs could go and set this up for themselves and get their staffs trained, and a lot of them did. We do it every spring. We just remind clubs that this is there, and it’s just one of those promotional things that we stick with and we’re about to do it again in the next month or so. Hopefully, we’ll continue to get those clubs to get your staffs trained because there’s a great satisfaction in coming through the incident, knowing that you did your best to help somebody. I’d hate to be on the other side of that – not having had any training and not knowing what to do – so hopefully, people understand that’s a real benefit for themselves and certainly a benefit for the others who might have this issue.
Scott
Oh, absolutely. If you think about all the staffs that get trained, I mean, instinctively or intuitively, I think, okay, if something happens at the golf course, they’re going to be ready, but these are all people that are trained. They’re going to the grocery store. They’re at the bank there, any place where this could happen. You’ve literally saved one life, but you may have saved many more just from this initiative.
Kevin
Yeah, I hope so. As I said, it gives you peace of mind knowing that, if something comes up, you could at least help somebody in the short term. None of us are really saving lives. We’re just holding on a little bit until the EMTs, the actual trained professionals could get there, and then the doctors take over from them. So it’s just one little cog in the wheel, if we can just keep them going, and that’s all I thought about when I was kneeling over Carlos – that I just needed to keep the blood flowing long enough for him to get some oxygen to his brain and circulate the blood circulate around his body so that, when the real professionals came, they could jump in and really save them.
Scott
Which they did.
Kevin
Yeah.
Scott
I love a story with a happy ending.
Kevin
For sure.
Scott
All right, Kevin, thanks for coming back on, and I wish you continued success.
Kevin
Thanks very much, Scott. Really appreciate the opportunity.
Scott
Kevin’s a great guy and I always enjoy talking with him. And if you enjoyed this story, you might want to check out last week’s episode with Carly. She was just out with her family driving around the neighborhood looking at Christmas lights, and SHE ended up performing CPR as well.
And I seriously was not planning to have two episodes in a row about someone doing CPR on a stranger, but that’s just how it worked out. Maybe that’s your sign to go take a CPR class so you’re ready if you find yourself in that situation.
Our question this week in the podcast listener Facebook group is this: What’s something that you tried once, but would never do it again? If something comes to mind and you’d like to share it, come on over and join us – WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook.
And I’ll just throw this out there one more time – there’s a specific guest I’m looking for. All I know is her first name – Genesis. She might live in the Chicago area. Or maybe she used to live there and now lives somewhere else. She appeared on the TV show The Carbonaro Effect, and I would love to have her on the podcast to talk about that experience. If you think you might know her, please have her get in touch with me.
Graphics for this episode were created by Bob Bretz. Full episode transcription was created by James Lai.
And – it’s time for the Listener Story. Every episode ends with a story sent in by a listener – doesn’t have to be completely crazy like our main episodes, just something interesting that happened to you. If you have a story like that, that you can tell in about 5-10 minutes, just record it on your phone and email it to me – Scott@WhatWasThatLike.com.
This week’s story is about a lesson learned in gun safety.
Stay safe, and I’ll see you back here next week with new episodes on Tuesday and Friday.
(Listener story)
For my 21st birthday, I decided that I wanted to stay with some friends up at my company’s cabin, which is in Truckee. It’s like a cabin from about 1980-ish, a little outdated cabin. I had my friends over there – about 3-4 of my friends – and then one of my coworkers, who is one of my friends, invited a couple of her friends from Nevada. So, her friends from Nevada came over. All of my friends are there too. I ended up going to sleep with my boyfriend.
We woke up the next morning. I walked out into the living room and I noticed that one of the mirrors that was hanging up in the living room was gone, but it was replaced with another mirror. So I walked over to the people that were staying there, and I asked them why the mirror was gone, and they said they had something to tell me. So, turns out, my coworker’s friend from Nevada brought his gun with him and, while they were drunk, they decided to play with the gun. He took his gun that he didn’t think was loaded and he shot it at the wall. Turns out there was a bullet in the chamber and he shot through the wall, missing a water heater by about three inches, causing there to be four holes in the wall, going straight through one wall that passed the water heater, went through the other wall, and then through the other wall, popped out of the exterior on the other side. So I ended up spending the rest of my vacation patching these holes that this man did.
I don’t know how my boyfriend and I didn’t wake up when the gunshot went off, but I’m just so grateful that nobody was hurt because there were people on the pouch that were sitting right in front of him that could have been shot. I had best friends that were sleeping in the loft upstairs. I could have been shot. It was just a horrible situation – the worst way to end the birthday weekend. I know now to not ever bring them around for anything anymore. It’s really eye-opening how things could change in an instant.